Sustainable development of organization has become a vital part for surviving in today's competitive business environment. For this, the need of corporate training and education programs aiming at fostering competitive human resources in the internati...
Sustainable development of organization has become a vital part for surviving in today's competitive business environment. For this, the need of corporate training and education programs aiming at fostering competitive human resources in the international society is getting more emphasized. In order to respond to such a social need, a new turn to instructional method as well as education environment is required. The necessity of on-line job training has been rapidly spreading in concert with the development of technology.
Corporate training and education programs should promote even 'Transfer' connected to job performance fundamentally by inducing the change of behavior as well as 'Learning' to maximize their effectiveness. Efforts to measure the extent of transfer or explore transfer-related variables are very meaningful, given that the ultimate purpose of training and education programs is to apply learning contents to jobs, leading to promote improved individual and organizational performance,
This study has attempted to identify learner's individual property, organizational and situational factors, and attributes of educational program which affect the learning transfer of on-line job training, and conducted to empirically draw detailed strategies and implications needed to plan, design and operate on-line job training course.
The purpose of this study is to confirm if self-efficacy and job involvement (learner's individual properties), organizational support (organizational and situational factor) and job relatedness (attribute of educational program) could predict learning transfer in the on-line job training and analyze empirically if job involvement could mediate between learning transfer and their relations.
The survey was conducted of 100 employees who took the on-line job training program carried out in August 2011 at O Elevator company and collected relevant data two times; Before implementing training and education program and six weeks after finishing the program in order to make a more exact measurement of the extent of transfer. Finally, 68 employees were used for the analysis, where correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis for identifying the relations between each variable, and mediation analysis, which was suggested by Baron and Kenny(1986), for observing the mediation effectiveness were applied.
According to results drawn by this study, self-efficacy, job involvement and job association in the on-line job training significantly predicted learning transfer. It was shown that job involvement has the mediation effectiveness between self-efficacy and learning transfer, and between organizational support and learning transfer.
Thus, in order for learners to apply newly-obtained knowledge and skills to their job, the analysis of learner's individual property has to be preceded before it should be designed for learners to plan a course and lead the learning. In addition, work environment and compensation system should be made when learners get back to work for them to involve in the jobs and get a successful learning transfer by making the most of their abilities.
Also, as for on-line job training, design and introduction of instructional contents corresponding to actual educational needs are more important than anything else, so a regular monitoring is required to know what a more specialized on-line job training is and what is required at the work site and the demands from work sites, suggestions and recommends from leaners should be swiftly reflected. Besides, it should focus on increasing job relatedness by providing actual application cases and implication cases in instructional contents. When developing corporate own on-line job training program, on-site specialists would be better in providing learners with training close to work site.
Moreover, since it was proven that job involvement mediates in the relation of self-efficacy (learner's motivation variable), organizational support (environment variable), and learning transfer, it is needed to find a systematical and strategical way of increasing job involvement in order to promote learning transfer in the on-line job training.
Meanwhile, this study has some limits as following.
First, as this study has used only four variables in measuring the level of transfer, it seems that learner's individual properties, organizational and situational factors and attributes of educational program were excessively simplified.
Second, this study used the self-report survey as a way of measuring the transfer, but only the level of learning transfer recognized by learners was measured.
Third, this study conducted the survey two times and as a result, it brought out a huge loss of those surveyed. The total number of those surveyed was 68, which is too hard to adopt results due to a small number of those surveyed. Forth, the framework for analysis presented in this study is based on the assumptions of dispersion theory, which predicts the results by assuming unidirectional causal relation between learner's individual properties (self-efficacy, job involvement), organizational and situational factors (organizational support), attributes of educational program (job relatedness), learner's training performance (learning transfer), and job involvement.
Fifth, this study doesn't cover detailed self-efficacy strategy, organizational support-promoting strategy, job involvement strategy and instruction design strategy in relation to job relatedness, which could be used for an actual on-line job training.
Sixth, it is needed to study for relation with other variables by subdividing the level of transfer as learning transfer makes dynamic changes.